The internals of Dorico and Cubase are very different at every level. When we started working on Dorico many years ago one of the first technical decisions we had to make was about whether we would be able to build Dorico on the same shared framework as Cubase and Nuendo. (WaveLab was already independent, and like Dorico is built on Qt.) Unfortunately there were many fundamental things that were going to be impractical to achieve using the shared framework, things that would have potentially delayed Dorico by multiple years, so we made the pragmatic solution to use Qt, which is a decision we do not regret at all. But it does mean that there is very little in common between how Dorico approaches anything and how Cubase approaches it. Again, I don’t think we regret this either, as it has allowed us to build Dorico in such a way that it addresses its domain in the way we judge to be best, rather than having to try to squeeze everything through a Cubase-shaped hole.
The disadvantage of this approach is that it makes it quite difficult, if not completely impractical, to actively use bits of user interface from Cubase. So we do have to reimplement key bits of editing functionality like the piano roll and automation editors ourselves.
I am always very interested to hear from people with a lot of experience with Cubase or indeed other DAWs as to what are the main pain points in Dorico’s editors in Play mode. There are several very experienced Cubase users on the Dorico team, but Cubase is such a deep application that in my own experience I can get a very different perspective on what the best or most efficient way to achieve a task is by talking to each user, and that is true even of my colleagues on the Dorico team.
So if you have a hit list of specific improvements you would like us to make to the editors in Play mode, please let me know what they are. Although we do not have the ambition to make the editors as functional and multi-purpose as their Cubase counterparts, we do want them to work as efficiently and painlessly as possible.